![]() If you think I was scared of the older boys, jesus, that was nothing compared to girl paralysis. And girls in the arcade? I always thought that was great! I mean, I was too shy to ever approach a girl. I was always a little scared of the older kids at the arcade, even though they never gave me reason to be. It's so different to call someone "fag" in real life than it is on Xbox Live. ![]() I also wonder if some of the disrespectful shit in the gaming world, if a good deal of that comes from the fact that you're saying something to someone you will never actually meet. I need to preserve this friendship so I can play this game for the rest of my life." ![]() The thing where you go to a friend's house and see Zelda for the first time and think, "Holy shit. The excitement of picking up a cartridge at Blockbuster and hoping that Green Dog is going to provide you a great weekend of gaming. Which is good for the consumer, but goddamn does it take away some of the mystery. And easy not to get, easy to check out pretty thoroughly before you buy. In some ways, I wonder if video game culture has really suffered in the current age. Where you would watch older guys at the arcade play games and say, "Wait.what the fuck? How did he do that?" Or you'd read a Mortal Kombat III strategy guide and desperately try to memorize the finishing moves before the store clerk reminded you of the game store's status as a library. I think what Kimball's book did is take me back to that place. Nobody would bother to code a warp zone into a game that they hoped people would never find. Games were packed with that stuff, and as an adult I can see that on some level, you were supposed to find it. You found it, used it, and then you were part of this secret club. There weren't other places where white text explained what the hell was going on. The thrill of walking on the ceiling in the first Mario castle, of finding the Warp Zone where text filled the screen. Hidden levels, hidden characters, all that stuff was so interesting because it felt like you weren't supposed to know. 10 times in a row and got the REAL ending. There's a kid who's three grades ahead in school, and his brother beat Mario Bros. Your friend's cousin who lives in Canada discovered a secret password in Metroid. And half of the things you heard about games was third-hand, at best. Pre-Internet, gaming was hard and confusing as hell. But I just thought it would be cool."Ī few reviewers found it annoying, but I have to say, it really brought me back to a different era of gaming. Sometimes the section will say something, maybe about a piece of fan art or a Galaga mod, and then a couple sections later Kimball will say, "That thing I said a couple sections back? That's not real. The book is broken up into really short sections, and then each section will say something about Galaga. He uses a really strange device in this book. Kimball shares his obsession with Galaga through a discussion of the innovative gameplay it introduced (including lots of tips), its extensive cultural legacy (including collectibles, movies, rap songs, drinking games, and sex acts), and how Galaga got Kimball through a difficult childhood-and maybe saved his life. Since its 1981 release, Galaga has inspired numerous sequels, bootlegs, hacks, and clones-and some version of Galaga has been released for nearly every gaming platform. What many call the greatest fixed shooter arcade game in history, Galaga broke the Space Invaders mold with superior graphics, faster firing, bonus rounds, tractor beams, and advanced enemy A.I. Acclaimed novelist and lifelong Galaga player Michael Kimball knows the compulsion: He’s set and re-set high scores on Galaga machines all across America. For fifteen seconds of the one of the highest-grossing films of all time, The Avengers’ plan to save the world comes to a grinding halt when Tony Stark calls out a low-level member of S.H.I.E.L.D.
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